Just William – William’s Television Show

Richmal Crompton's William's Television Show is a set of William stories for 8 year olds, in which a scruffy schoolboy is once again completely certain he has worked out what's going on.

He hasn't. That's the whole joke, and it has held up for a very long time.

In the first story William's sister Ethel has finally had enough of Archie, the hopeless artist next door who is in love with her. Archie's new car is the problem. It leaps into hedges. It reverses into walls. Getting out of a friend's driveway takes about fifteen goes and takes half the garden with it.

Ethel tells him it's over. Archie, stung, announces he will get a proper job and keep it.

Then William starts noticing things.

Archie catches the train every morning in a smart suit. But William and Ginger keep spotting a man at Archie's cottage who is somehow not Archie. Obviously this is a double. Or a twin brother stolen at birth. Obviously there is money involved. Obviously there is a gang.

William's solution is to padlock the garage with the villain inside it, which is how Ethel ends up opening the door to find Archie asleep in the back of his own car with a very embarrassing confession to make.

The pleasure here isn't the plot. It's the narrator, who calls Archie's car a thing of "zest and spirit and a sense of adventure" and then lists everything it flattens. Very dry, and a fair bit of it sails over an eight-year-old and lands squarely with whoever is reading along (which is half the fun of doing it together).

This is properly old, though. It's the thirty-first William book, and it shows in the shillings, the sweet shops and the long curling sentences. William's own speech is written out phonetically too, all "int'restin'" and "jolly int'restin'", which takes a page or two to get used to.

So it isn't a quick win. Is your reader happy being read to, or already fond of something with a bit of old-fashioned grain to it? Then William repays the effort. If they want short paragraphs and a joke on every page, this will feel like hard work.

Better to start at the beginning anyway. The very first Just William book has him with a shilling from his aunt, sixpence of Gooseberry Eyes and an afternoon at the Picture Palace that gives him some extremely bad ideas.